By Ingrid Carlberg
Maclehose Press, £30
Investigative journalist Ingrid Carlberg's biography of Raoul Wallenberg, the young Swedish diplomat who faced down the Gestapo and rescued Jews in Budapest during the murderous months of 1944 when Hungary came under Nazi occupation, follows quite closely on the heels of that by historian Bengt Jangfeldt.
Carlberg's approach is altogether more forensic and she has unearthed a staggering amount of detail. At last, we are made to understand the full reasons why the courageous Swede was arrested in January 1945 and brutally incarcerated for years as an "American spy" by the Soviets, who denied any knowledge of his whereabouts. He was finally executed by Stalin's secret police, the NKVD.
Wallenberg's rescue mission had been funded by the War Refugee Board, an agency of the US State Department, of which the Soviets were highly suspicious. This same agency had helped 30,000 Baltic citizens flee to Sweden when the Red Army invaded the Baltic states the same year. Predictably, the Soviets labelled those refugees as "fascistic elements". Add to this the fact that Wallenberg was a scion of Sweden's pre-eminent capitalist family - i.e. a "class enemy" - and his fate was as good as sealed. His arrest was ordered by Stalin, who, as Carlberg puts it: "saw spies everywhere, who himself had spies everywhere".
